Appleby and her colleagues are appalled at Darwin’s description of ‘the low morality of savages . . . their insufficient powers of reasoning . . . [their] weak power of self-command’, and state that ‘now many people are shocked by his racism’. But there was no racism at all, as far as I can tell, in Darwin’s comment. He was alluding to the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, suffering from grinding scarcity in the most barren and Antarctic province of Argentina. When he described a South American woman of African origin who threw herself to her death rather than submit to slavery, he noted that it was only prejudice that kept us from seeing her defiance in the same heroic light as we would a similar act by the proud matron of a noble Roman family. He was himself almost thrown off the Beagle by Captain FitzRoy for his militant opposition to the Captain’s racism. Darwin was head and shoulders above most of his contemporaries in this regard.
But again, even if he was not, how does it affect the truth or falsity of natural selection? Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves; Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi were imperfect husbands and fathers. The list goes on indefinitely. We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future? Some of the habits of our age will doubtless be considered barbaric by later generations – perhaps for insisting that small children and even infants sleep alone instead of with their parents; or exciting nationalist passions as a means of gaining popular approval and achieving high political office; or allowing bribery and corruption as a way of life; or keeping pets; or eating animals and jailing chimpanzees; or criminalizing the use of euphoriants by adults; or allowing our children to grow up ignorant.
Occasionally, in retrospect, someone stands out. In my book, the English-born American revolutionary Thomas Paine is one such. He was far ahead of his time. He courageously opposed monarchy, aristocracy, racism, slavery, superstition and sexism when all of these constituted the conventional wisdom. He was unswerving in his criticism of conventional religion. He wrote in The Age of Reason: ‘Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the word of God. It … has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.’ At the same time the book exhibited the deepest reverence for a Creator of the Universe whose existence Paine argued was apparent at a glance at the natural world. But condemning much of the Bible while embracing God seemed an impossible position to most of his contemporaries. Christian theologians concluded he was drunk, mad or corrupt. The Jewish scholar David Levi forbade his co-religionists from even touching, much less reading, the book. Paine was made to suffer so much for his views (including being thrown into prison after the French Revolution for being too consistent in his opposition to tyranny) that he became an embittered old man.*
[* Paine was the author of the revolutionary pamphlet ‘Common Sense’. Published on 10 January 1776, it sold over half a million copies in the next few months and stirred many Americans to the cause of independence. He was the author of the three best-selling books of the eighteenth century. Later generations reviled him for his social and religious views. Theodore Roosevelt called him a ‘filthy little atheist’ – despite his profound belief in God. He is probably the most illustrious American revolutionary uncommemorated by a monument in Washington, DC.]
Yes, the Darwinian insight can be turned upside down and grotesquely misused: voracious robber barons may explain their cut-throat practices by an appeal to Social Darwinism; Nazis and other racists may call on ‘survival of the fittest’ to justify genocide. But Darwin did not make John D. Rockefeller or Adolf Hitler. Greed, the Industrial Revolution, the free enterprise system, and corruption of government by the monied are adequate to explain nineteenth-century capitalism. Ethnocentrism, xenophobia, social hierarchies, the long history of anti-Semitism in Germany, the Versailles Treaty, German child-rearing practices, inflation and the Depression seem adequate to explain Hitler’s rise to power. Very like these or similar events would have transpired with or without Darwin. And modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by robber barons and Fiihrers — altruism, general intelligence, compassion – may be the key to survival.
If we could censor Darwin, what other kinds of knowledge could also be censored? Who would do the censoring? Who among us is wise enough to know which information and insights we can safely dispense with, and which will be necessary ten or a hundred or a thousand years into the future? Surely we can exert some discretion on which kinds of machines and products it is safe to develop. We must in any case make such decisions, because we do not have the resources to pursue all possible technologies. But censoring knowledge, telling people what they must think, is the aperture to thought police, authoritarian government, foolish and incompetent decision-making and long-term decline.
Fervid ideologues and authoritarian regimes find it easy and natural to impose their views and suppress the alternatives. Nazi scientists, such as the Nobel laureate physicist Johannes Stark, distinguished fanciful, imaginary ‘Jewish science’, including relativity and quantum mechanics, from realistic, practical Aryan science’. Another example: ‘A new era of the magical explanation of the world is rising,’ said Adolf Hitler, ‘an explanation based on will rather than knowledge. There is no truth, in either the moral or the scientific sense.’
As he described it to me three decades later, in 1922 the American geneticist Hermann J. Muller flew from Berlin to Moscow in a light plane to witness the new Soviet society firsthand. He must have liked what he saw, because – after his discovery that radiation makes mutations (a discovery that would later win him a Nobel Prize) – he moved to Moscow to help establish modern genetics in the Soviet Union. But by the middle 1930s a charlatan named Trofim Lysenko had caught the notice and then the enthusiastic support of Stalin. Lysenko argued that genetics – which he called ‘Mendelism-Weissmanism-Morganism’, after some of the founders of the field – had an unacceptable philosophical base, and that philosophically ‘correct’ genetics, genetics that paid proper obeisance to communist dialectical materialism, would yield very different results. In particular, Lysenko’s genetics would permit an additional crop of winter wheat – welcome news to a Soviet economy reeling from Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture.
Lysenko’s purported evidence was suspect, there were no experimental controls, and his broad conclusions flew in the face of an immense body of contradictory data. As Lysenko’s power grew, Muller passionately argued that classical Mendelian genetics was in full harmony with dialectical materialism, while Lysenko, who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics and denied a material basis of heredity, was an ‘idealist’, or worse. Muller was strongly supported by N.I. Vavilov, erstwhile president of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
In a 1936 address to the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, now presided over by Lysenko, Muller gave a stirring address that included these words:
If the outstanding practitioners are going to support theories and opinions that are obviously absurd to everyone who knows even a little about genetics – such views as those recently put forward by President Lysenko and those who think as he does – then the choice before us will resemble the choice between witchcraft and medicine, between astrology and astronomy, between alchemy and chemistry.
In a country of arbitrary arrests and police terror, this speech displayed exemplary – many thought foolhardy – integrity and courage. In The Vavilov Affair (1984), the Soviet emigre historian Mark Popovsky describes these words as being accompanied by ‘thunderous applause from the whole hall’ and ‘remembered by everyone still living who took part in the session’.
Three months later, Muller was visited in Moscow by a Western geneticist who expressed astonishment at a widely circulated letter, signed by Muller, that condemned the prevalence of ‘Mendelism-Weissmanism-Morganism’ in the West and that urged a boycott of the forthcoming International Congress of Genetics. Having never seen, much less signed, such a letter, an outraged Muller concluded that it was a forgery perpetrated by Lysenko. Muller promptly wrote an angry denunciation of Lysenko to Pravda and mailed a copy to Stalin.
The next day Vavilov came to Muller in a state of some agitation, informing him that he, Muller, had just volunteered to serve in the Spanish Civil War. The letter to Pravda had put Muller’s life in danger. He left Moscow the next day, just evading, so he was later told, the NKVD, the secret police. Vavilov was not so lucky, and perished in 1943 in Siberia.
With the continuing support of Stalin and later of Khrushchev, Lysenko ruthlessly suppressed classical genetics. Soviet school biology texts in the early 1960s had as little about chromosomes and classical genetics as many American school biology texts have about evolution today. But no new crop of winter wheat grew; incantations of the phrase ‘dialectical materialism’ went unheard by the DNA of domesticated plants; Soviet agriculture remained in the doldrums; and today, partly for this reason, Russia -world-class in many other sciences – is still almost hopelessly backward in molecular biology and genetic engineering. Two generations of modern biologists have been lost. Lysenkoism was not overthrown until 1964, in a series of debates and votes at the Soviet Academy of Sciences – one of the few institutions to maintain a degree of independence from the leaders of party and state – in which the nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov played an outstanding role.